Hello Folks,
this post is from Santiago, Chile during the October 10th-21st where there was great civil unrest. After a week of student protests of the 30 centavos(cents) fare increase for the metro subways, the high school student massed into the system without paying to make a protest. This went on for several days until things began to get violent with outsiders and the some of the students themselves deciding to destroy the metro stations. Before it was over, 40 stations were gutted, burned and trains were set aflame. Then, the entire city and many other town's residence around the country went bizark and started to loot and burn buildings, banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, auto stores, malls, buses, cars and back again to the metros. A state of emergency was declared by the President two nights ago which made people even madder and the military entered the streets and a 10-7 curfew was imposed. Now, normally I would have been in the streets on my bicycle with my camera capturing the revolt, but I am leaving Chile for a couple months tonight and wanted to stay with my family here to see how things went in our barrio. Things went bad and most of our grocery stores in walking distance are looted and those that did not get looted are closed and they are reinforcing the entrances. Also, my wife begged me not to go out and my usual partner in crime was on the other side of the city covering his own barrios implosion. The reasons that many people decided to destroy their own neighborhoods is because they are slowly sinking financially with the vast wealth inequalities where most people can barely pay their rent now that almost all of the country's once public institutions have been privatized and the new owners, some foreign, keep raising the fees for electrify, gas, water, transit and food. There is several big protests planned for Monday and Tuesday where all the nations doctors will march to protest the gutting of the health care system where chemotherapy treatments are being cancelled amongst other things. The military will be in the streets for at least two weeks and I think things will get worse before they get better. The government only blames the rioting on criminals and delinquents but the President is the richest man in the country and did not pay his own taxes for almost 30 years to large banks where he owed millions of dollars. I am not an advocate for violence and looting and burning as I think those people should have simply took the metro up to the rich side of town, camped out in front of the 1 percenters and made noise until they were heard. Instead, they decided to destroy their own metro system and can no longer get to that side of town. Three million people use the metro every day and now nobody can get to work.
In closing, let this be a lesson to my country in the USA; you just cannot ignore the very poor in favor of the rich or those without hope will come out in force and destroy everything when they feel they have no connection to society anymore.
This is the corner to my apartment building where either the police are controlling it or the rioters are building bonfires and guzzling beer. Two blocks over is the biggest street in the city which leads to the capital and when the protesters get ran off of that area the come to my neighborhood to raise hell.
These police and army vehicles race down my street and people hiding on their roofs toss rock and bottles at them from above.
This is the entrance to our metro Santa Lucia where they had tried to ram their way into it and also started a fire at the metal gates.
This is the ENEL building one block from our apartment which is now privately owned by a cousin to the president. The rates for electricity have been going up in increments of 25% and this is whey the building was targeted.
